As America witnesses yet another horrific mass shooting tragedy like the one that claimed the lives of 26 people in Texas on Sunday, the right is once again calling for “thoughts and prayers” while the left argues that thoughts and prayers aren’t enough and that we finally need sensible gun control laws. Every time something like this happens the protests grow louder, and Paul Ryan took exceptional flack for tweeting that “the people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now.”
It’s gotten to the point that there’s a backlash to the thoughts and prayers backlash, which Mike Huckabee addressed on Fox News Tuesday morning. “The truth is, it’s good, decent people who do pray, who do feel a sense of responsibility, who are the key to stopping this kind of carnage,” the former Arkansas governor claimed, incorrectly, since clearly nothing changes from one tragedy to the next.
When asked about some of the recent tweets and headlines slamming thoughts and prayers, Huckabee responded, “People who says things like that clearly are ignorant of God and prayer, and that’s why they say it, they have no clue what they’re talking about. We don’t pray because we’re trying to change God, we pray because we’re trying to change us.”
“We’re trying to pray so that we get in tune with God,” he continued, somewhat confusingly. “We’re not trying to get God in tune with who we are, that’d be like tuning the tuning fork to the instrument. No, we tune the instrument to the tuning fork, God is the tuning fork. We pray because we ask for him to remove from us these horrible, hateful, bigoted, hideous feelings that would cause us to turn to violence against each other.”
So he’s saying the Texas gunman just needed to pray a little harder? Sure.